“Good old Bruce. He’s never given up on me. Always been my best friend.”An experimental procedure promises to restore Harvey Dent (Richard Moll) and rid him of his Two-Face persona for good. But as the former district attorney goes under anesthesia, he’s abducted by a gang of ne’er-do-wells, who threaten that their boss wants to “teach him some respect.” Bruce Wayne was funding the procedure, but it falls to Batman and Robin to catch the crooks – with Rupert Thorne and the Penguin as top suspects in the abduction.
On the occasion of Two-Face’s final appearance in Batman: The Animated Series (and with only five more episodes in the entire run), it’s an appropriate time to begin to think about the overall arcs of the show, and so these reviews may start to feel a bit final as the showrunners close up their bibles and move toward The New Batman Adventures. With last week’s episode, “Second Chance” is one of three episodes in a row that deals with a villain’s efforts to go straight, and BtAS remains in its final hours deeply pessimistic but equally empathetic about the impossibility of a rogue’s reform. If you haven’t seen the episode or figured it out yet, spoiler warning – the episode’s third act turns on the revelation that it was Two-Face himself who kidnapped Harvey Dent, a painful psychological break that was as much madness as it was self-defense.
In this way, “Second Chance” is a worthy sequel to the masterful two-parter “Two-Face” from the earliest days of the show, and this is something that BtAS has always done well; in the absence of long-running arcs, the writers often revisited standout episodes with remarkable follow-ups that built on the themes and characters. (See also “His Silicon Soul,” “I Am the Night,” and “Day of the Samurai,” to name a few.) In “Second Chance,” the writers pick up the tragedy of Harvey Dent and further explore this idea that Harvey’s worst demons have always been himself. From a clever use of flashbacks to the reappearance of Harvey’s psychiatrist, “Second Chance” picks up the baton from “Two-Face” in giving us a painful exploration of a man whose scars run so much deeper than the cosmetic fix his doctors pursue.
Usually on episodes like this one, with three distinct writers and a director, I’ll wonder why so many cooks got involved with the broth, but in this case the three writers work together pretty seamlessly. There must have been some division of labor between the Two-Face bits and the search for Harvey, but I think it’s evident that the Paul Dini bits are the ones that make this episode feel like one day in a vast tapestry of Gotham nights. Continuity with “Two-Face” aside, it’s quintessential Batman to discover that our Dark Knight has a readymade list of suspects even before the abduction. Moreover, the scene with Penguin (featuring Paul Williams at his Burgess Meredith best) introduces a lengthy backstory and rivalry between Penguin and Two-Face. In the hands of a less capable craftsman, that sort of brute-force exposition might feel hamfisted, but the writers here have a way of working those words into conversation, helped perhaps by the fact that Penguin’s syntax is more circuitous than the long way through a thesaurus.
The only sour note struck in this episode is at the very end, when the episode plays through its denouement and one last somber reminder of the sad state of Harvey’s psyche. It’s the kind of melancholy beat this show usually grasped in its best episodes. Here, though, the writers pivot toward a schmaltzy retread of the final shot in Casablanca, in which Dick and Bruce remind each other that, goshdarnit, life is grand because they’re such good pals to each other. I actually had to rewind the episode to make sure that’s where it ended because it’s a tonal catastrophe with the rest of the episode’s serious interrogation of split-personality. It’s also a reminder that the show was attempting to move into a more visibly kid-friendly mode (note the increased appearances of Robin as the show went on), which was never why it gained prominence in the first place. We came for the earnest exploration of the Batman and his world, who he was and how his enemies came to be; we stayed for stories like this one, that remind us that these stories matter because they are about superhuman figures who remain, at the end of the day, failingly human.
Writers: Paul Dini, Michael Reaves, and Gerry Conway
Director: Boyd Kirkland
Villains: Two-Face (Richard Moll), The Penguin (Paul Williams), and Rupert Thorne (John Vernon)
Next episode: “Harley’s Holiday,” in which the going gets kooky, and so the kooky go shopping.
🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇
No comments:
Post a Comment